24 December 2016

In keeping with its spare design, 2e Boot Hill contains exactly one 'social skill,' minor character morale (p. 13). Player characters are as courageous as a player chooses for them to be when faced with "difficult or desperate situations," but "minor characters," defined as "associates of the player's character or other persons incidental to a game" like clerks. are subject to morale checks rolled against their Bravery attribute scores when faced with "a critical situation," such as "an armed and potentially deadly enemy." Morale for minor characters is rolled at the start of the "situation" by rolling against the minor character's Bravery attribute score - a roll over the Bravery score means the character "will act to avoid the confrontation."

The core rules provide two modifiers for the morale roll. First, the roll is adjusted downward by fiver percent for each of the minor character's companions - there's perceived safety in numbers, and the rules go on to add that a minor character is not subject to morale rolls after the initial check if his group outnumbers the opposing group of characters.

The other morale bonus is provided by characters with a "reputation." A "major character" has a reputation if the character has "experience equal to 8 or more gunfights." What exactly is a "major character?" The rules imply without saying outright that the player characters are "major characters," but it also hints that significant non-player characters may be treated as "major characters" as well, using the examples of encountering Wild Bill Hickock or Wyatt Earp as triggering morale rolls. A character with a reputation provides three times the benefit to morale as an ordinary friend or companion (-15 versus -5 on a d% roll).

There are special morale rules for cavalry and Indian war parties but beyond that, the game says nothing more on the subject of social interactions beyond 'the referee will decide.' This would change with the first module, BH1 Mad Mesa. Mad Mesa significantly expands the rules for minor character morale - now specifically targeted at non-player characters, "a character not controlled by a player" - by further defining circumstances which may trigger a morale check, such as "calling a person a card cheat" or "being insulted," and adding a number of additional modifiers to the morale roll. Now a character who is "enraged," drunk, or defending his personal property gets a bonus to morale roll, while a character facing someone with a reputation or wounded takes a penalty. The most interesting modifiers have to do with companions getting killed: if the npc is near another individual who is killed, the penalty is +5 to the roll - remember, this is roll-under the Bravery score - whereas if the individual killed is a friend, the bonus is -10, so if some hired gunhand eats lead at the Railroad Corral, that'll rattle a fellow, but if it's his brother, then he's gonna git the varmint who kil't his kin.

The other social interaction rule added to Boot Hill in Mad Mesa is the NPC Reaction Table. For me, this is the one glaring omission in the core rules, but the simple 2d6 table in Mad Mesa makes up for it, particularly the list of modifiers that comes with it. In these modifiers are complete social rules for BH campaigns.

Most of the games with which I'm familiar use some sort of character attribute or ability as the basis for modifying reaction rolls. Charisma or some similar 'personality' attribute score is the most common example; skills or skill levels are another. Original, 'classic' Traveller interestingly gives a bonus for reaching a certain rank in the military services, along with bonuses for certain skills.

Many reaction roll modifiers in Mad Mesa, however, are based on something else entirely: the character's actions in the game-world. Affiliate yourself with the law. Suffer a conviction as a criminal. Spare a non-player character's life. Kill a non-player character's friend. A character's decisions reverberate through the setting in the way the world reacts to her. How a character interacts with others in the setting carries significant consequences. In short, the character gains another reputation, not based on gunfights survived but on how the character is perceived in the social milieu of the setting, based on how the player roleplays the character.

Because a character's social reputation is based on the character's actions, the reaction table modifiers all serve as an incentive toward certain behaviors. If you want to develop a positive reputation, then there are actions to pursue and others to avoid. There's a catch in this: most of the modifiers benefit law-abiding behavior. Should an outlaw react favorably for a character affiliated with the law? Or will they gravitate toward those who are criminals? The simple solution here is, for characters who curry favor with outlaws or pursue a life of crime, just flip the modifiers when interacting with other crooks.

There are even tactical considerations baked into the reaction roll modifiers. Want to avoid a fight? Stay away from a man when he's drunk or angry at you - let 'im cool off. Want to pick a fight? Send an ally to buy him drinks, then insult him to his face - he'll be ready to throw down.

The next module for the game, BH2 Lost Conquistador Mine, introduces some additional reaction roll modifiers; the ones most significant for our campaign have been the racial bias modifiers, with 'Mexicans' receiving a -2 and Indians and 'half-breeds' receiving a -4 penalty to reaction rolls. Written specifically for the town of Dead Mule, where racial animus is an important factor, these take a little judgement to apply: my character, Eladio Luna, doesn't take a penalty in dealing with hispanos, frex. BH2 modifiers for allegiance during the Civil War have affected another character's social interactions in the campaign as well.

My character's complex relationship with the setting is reflected in the reputation of modifiers he's acquired over the course of the campaign so far. He felt the sting of prejudice as a Tejano (-2) and his esteem suffered when he plead guilty to misdemeanor assault after shooting a gambler who called him a cheat (-1). Serving on a deputy US marshal's posse and twice being deputized to guard prisoners created a favorable impression (+2), as did rescuing horses from a burning barn and fighting a band of renegade Apaches single-handed (+1). Regular attendance at Mass ingratiated him with the Catholic community in Promise City (+1); this proved particularly significant when vigilantes met to consider running Eladio out of town or lynching him and the Catholics among them spoke on his behalf.

I like social skills in roleplaying games, but I don't ever feel the need to play a game with such skills again; I'd much rather see reputation rules instead, as they reflect not who the character is in but the consequences of roleplaying and a life lived in the setting.

05 December 2016

The map of El Dorado County that comes in 2e and 3e Boot Hill shows the locations of mountainous and forested terrain, an area of badlands, a network of trails or roads, and major rivers and lakes, but it only shows two settlements, Promise City, the seat of El Dorado County, and Fort Griffin, an army outpost. The 2e rule book contains a list of features for referees - just names, in most cases - to add to their county map: towns, with brief descriptions of each, plus mountain ranges and hills, rivers and lakes, an Indian reservation and trading posts, and mines and ranches. It feels a little like B1 In Search of the Unknown for D&D or TS001 Operation: Sprechenhaltestelle for Top Secret, but with even less detail on the environment than those modules, or to the deck plans on the Warden in the first Metamorphosis Alpha. I love this approach to modules: it assumes from the motherlovin' giddyup that every campaign will be unique, that it's expected and desired for my El Dorado County to be different from someone else's El Dorado County.

The base map of El Dorado County and environs is gridded with hexes. The area covered by the map is impressive - the map itself is poster sized with a grid 111 hexes high by 148 hexes wide. with roughly 4.5 hexes to the inch. According to the rules (2e BH, "The Maps," p. 16), "The scale of the [county] map is one hex = 2 miles."

A question that comes up on gamer forums from time to time is, when a hex is said to be x distance across, at what points on the hexagon do you measure? As any old wargamer can tell you, distances on a hex map are usually measured from the center of one hex to the center of an adjacent hex, which means that the dimension of interest to roleplaying gamers is the height (h) of the hex - the distance center-to-center to two same-size regular hexagons is equal to the height of one of the hexagons. I don't think I've ever come across a game in which the distance across a hex is equivalent to the diagonal (d) or the side (s), though I've certainly heard gamers try to make the case for each of these, usually demonstrating they know even less about geometry than they do about games - remember, kids, work hard at maths 'cause innumeracy kills.

This means we're talking about a pretty extensive area for El Dorado County and those portions of its neighbors shown on the map, roughly 222 miles by 296 miles, or nearly 66,000 square miles of country to explore for the adventurers, and to populate for the referee. In terms of settlements, the rules offer twenty-two examples of towns and other communities for the referee to place on the map. The size of towns isn't give in terms of population, but in terms of number of buildings - the largest, Promise City, the only civilian settlement printed on the map, is given as "about 75 buildings," with the printed poster map showing "about 60 of them" (2e BH, "Towns," pp. 28-30).

Twenty-two settled hexes out of over 16,000 would seem to be the very definition of 'wide open spaces,' but are all those hexes really that empty? Many of the town descriptions describe nearby farms and ranches which the towns serve, but no other information beyond the names of a few of the largest ranches in the county is provided in the core rules. The most of the published adventures for BH don't add a lot to this - BH3 Burned Bush Wells, frex, only offers the locations of the ranch headquarters by their brands imprinted on the map - with the exception of BH4 Range War! which goes into significant detail, including a custom map with hexes representing 100 acres.

Before I dig into that, since Range War! tells us the area of its hexes, what's the area of the hexes on the campaign map? The formula for the area of a hexagon is A = (3√3 s2)/2 - deriving the length of a side from the height is s = h/√3. This gives an area of slightly less than 3.5 mi2 per hex - if we round off to 3.5 mi2, then we get 2240 acres per hex on the El Dorado County map.

Towns themselves take up an utterly insignificant portion of that acreage - Promise City, the county seat and largest settlement, occupies a mere 0.07 acres as shown on the printed town map - so how about those farms and ranches? As a baseline, let's start with that ubiquitous feature of the Western landscape, the homestead. Under the 1862 Homestead Act, settlers could claim a 160 acre parcel of land which they were then obligated to improve by building a dwelling and growing crops in order to obtain clear title after five years. The system was onerously abused by land speculators and most actual homesteads failed because the acreage allotted was insufficient for the climate west of the Mississippi River, but it's a useful means of estimating how many individual family farms might be found in a hex. A hex of 2240 acres will support fourteen homesteads, and a seven-hex cluster - the town hex and a hinterland of the six immediately adjacent hexes - may contain up to 98 homesteads.

Like the rest of the country, the population of the West in the late 19th century is predominately rural - in the 1870s, the period in which our campaign takes place, the US urban population as a percentage of total population was just under 26%, but this varied quite a bit in the western states: Nebraska and Kansas average around 16% while Texas an New Mexico are closer to 6%. I could very easily find myself going down the rabbit hole of researching the average rural versus urban household size in the US of the 1870s so I can derive a figure for the rural population surrounding an urban center based on the number of buildings in a town as indicated in the core rules, but while that would be an entertaining intellectual exercise, for purposes of playing a game I'd rather have a handy rule of thumb, so here it is: each building in a town supports, and is supported in turn, by five homesteads.

This means the "somewhat prosperous" El Dorado County town of Justice, "located in an abundant farming area" and consisting of "about a dozen buildings," could be surrounded by around 60 homesteads, which suggests a hinterland of about four to five hexes. Since I don't think of them packed in evenly with one another, I'm going to call it a seven-hex 'footprint' with scattered homesteads on the periphery. Someplace like Rio Neches, a "backwater town" of a mere ten buildings, may have just 50 homesteads in its hinterland occupying around three hexes.

That takes care of the sodbusters - how about the cattlemen? As I mentioned a few paragraphs back, BH4 Range War! offers some ranch acreages with which to work. In the module, the "largest of the . . . County ranches," the McCloskey Ranch, "covers 26 square miles," giving it an acreage of 16,640 acres and a footprint on the campaign map of a little more than seven hexes - about the same as 100 homesteads. The Farrigan Ranch, on the other hand, is eleven square miles, or 7040 acres, covering slightly more than three hexes on the campaign map. The Hyde Ranch, which is shown on the module map but not described in the text, is closer to 11,000 acres or five hexes. Range War! is something of an oddity - it sets Promise City in Grant County, Oregon, not El Dorado County, 'somewhere in the Southwest,' and the author, Philip Taterczynski, clearly knows something of the settlement of the Oregon Territory, frex, referring to one of the farms outside Promise City as a "Donation Claim of 320 acres." Oregonian public land grants tended to be second in size only to those vast tracts granted to the railroads, so ranch sizes may be fairly large butthey provide a reference point for deciding how much land is occupied around a town by ranches. Moreover, a ranch of three to five hexes in size fits what's represented on the map for BH3 Burned Bush Wells, with the Rocking G perhaps being more in the seven hex range.

It's possible to reverse engineer this as well. BH3 Ballots & Bullets gives the number of cattle owned by the three big ranchers outside Promise City - as described in an article in The Dragon 18, a longhorn requires two acres of grassland, so this would suggest that, at a minimum, the Shaws of the Lazy S own "about 300 cattle," suggesting a range of, at minimum, 600 acres. Since all three of the big ranchers in BH3 are wealthy and influential in local politics, to the point of being a driving force behind one of the factions in Promise City, I would say this is an extreme low end at best.

El Dorado County should have plenty of small ranchers as well: "Four hundred and sixty acres might be little to you, Nathan, but it was a lot of country to me." For our campaign, to keep things simple, small ranches occupy 320 acres, equivalent to two homesteads, but they tend to be spread out more, such that there are never more than five in a hex. A settlement described as a cattle town will have 1-5 large ranches in its hinterland, with a number of small ranches equal to one-half the number of buildings in town. Stetson City, "a ranching town" of "about 20 buildings," has one large ranch of seven hexes and two of five hexes plus ten small ones occupying the equivalent of about two hexes.

All of this is subject to good judgement. In our campaign, frex, it's an established fact of the setting that the large ranchers - the Shaws, the Morands, and the Kings - drive small ranchers off 'their range,' so there aren't thirty-six small ranchers in the vicinity of Promise City. Plaza del Lobo, due to its "isolated locale" and "[r]ecurring rumors of bad water," doesn't have anything close to the seventy-five homesteads its fifteen buildings might warrant. Wild Creek, "a small but bustling lumber town," has only a couple of small farms and a ranch which provide supplies to the lumberjacks. These are guidelines, no more, no less.

So, to the titular question: how many hexes is the Ponderosa? According to a statement made in the first episode of Bonanza after the pilot, the Cartwright spread is a thousand square miles, equal to 640,000 acres. That puts the Ponderosa at a shade under 286 hexes, which is a lot of ground but still only a small piece of the more than 16,000 hexes which make up the BH campaign map.

13 November 2016

My favorite skill system from any roleplaying game is secondary skills from 1e AD&D. A player character receives a secondary skill or skills as follows:

Assign a skill randomly, or select according to the background of your campaign. To determine if a second skill is known, roll on the table, and if the dice indicate a result of TWO SKILLS, then assign a second, appropriate one. (1e AD&D DMG, p. 12)

And here's how secondary skill usage is resolved in the game:

When secondary skills are used, it is up to the DM to create and/or adjudicate situations in which these skills are used or useful to the player character. (ibid)

Got that? Pick a skill, or roll for one, and roll to see if you have a second, then make something up in the game when the skills could be useful.

I can hear gamer heads exploding even as I type. 'That's not a system! That's barely even a rule!' Yeah, I know, and that's why I love it so - it takes all the number-crunching and member-measuring out of skill usage.

When I ran 1e AD&D, secondary skills served as a sort of catch-all description of things the character knows about or can perform outside of the character's adventuring class. Frex, if your character's secondary skill is forester, she can cruise a stand of timber, fall a tree where she wants it with an axe or saw, rig a rope hoist, balance on a floating log, climb a tree using a rope, maintain a faller's tools, perhaps know a few elvish or gnomish words and phrases, if appropriate to the campaign, and other shit like that.

As I noted in the previous post describing my Boot Hill character, BH is conspicuously short on character attributes beyond basics related to combat: how fast is my character? how good a shot? how steady in a fight? how tough? how much fighting experience? The rules provide a tiny handful of bonuses or 'abilities' to player characters. If your character is a gambler, you receive a Gambler Rating. If your character is a scout or a detective, you gain a bonus to tracking rolls. If your character is or was an artillerist, then you can crew a cannon without the chance of blowing yourself up. If your character is a sharpshooter, you can call your shots.

The interesting thing here is, the only 'ability' for which the game requires a pre-requisite is sharpshooting - your character must have a Gun or Throwing Accuracy rating of 'Crack Shot' or 'Deadeye' to, frex, attempt to shoot a man in his gun-hand. There are zero rules in BH for determining who gets to be a gambler or a tracker or an artillerist. You simply say, 'My character is a gambler,' and roll for your Gambler Rating, or, 'My character is an Army scout,' and take the bonus each time you track. In my earlier post on character creation, I noted that a player could opt to take all three, and when one of the players in our game figured that out, as I alluded in the earlier post, he did exactly that: his character, Murdo Cunningham, is a former Union Army officer who learned to play cards with the other soldiers around the caissons as a member of the Horse Artillery during the Civil War - he then joined the Pinkertons after he left the service, 'shooting Chinamen for the railroads.'

Can you hear the heads popping again, amid keening wails of 'But . . . BALANCE?!' These few abilities in Boot Hill are perfectly balanced, by the highly expedient system of consensus around the table: 'Yeah, okay,' or 'Nah, not happening, dude.'

And that brings me to 2e Boot Hill's skill system: there isn't one.

Really, the only things in BH that even resemble 'skills' are gambling or sharpshooting: characters with a Gambler Rating can cheat, and sharpshooters can call their shots. But every character can track - characters who are scouts or detectives can do it just a little better. Every character can crew a cannon - characters who are artillerists can do it with no chance of the cannon exploding. There are no restrictions on dynamiting, or bronco busting - any character can attempt these without penalty. And there are no skills for all the picayune nonsense which pads the page count of so many roleplaying games, like Accounting or Assaying or Bartending or Saddlemaking - yeah, 3e Boot Hill, I'm looking right into your beady little snake eyes.

Now, there is a school of game design out there which argues that what the game covers in its rules is what the game is about, also known as 'gamers who never played Diplomacy, or didn't get it if they did.' The absence of rules for skills, or backgrounds, or careers - beyond a list of wages for varying Old West jobs - is not proof that the game is nothing more than tabletop skirmish rules - I'm inclined to think gamers who argue that point are, in fact, demonstrating their own lack of roleplaying skill or a terminal failure of imagination, but I admit I'm more than a little uncharitable in this. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

So, how do we decide what a character knows, and is good at, beyond the basic attributes and minimal abilities defined by the rules of the game? We each decide what our characters know, by background, vocation, or avocation, and "adjudicate situations in which these . . . are used or useful to the player character." My character is a cowboy so he can herd cattle: cut out a steer, rope it, hog-tie it and brand it or ear clip it. He can spot diseased cows, or turn a herd in to stop a stampede. He knows brands and a bit of husbandry, can free-trail a string of ponies, treat a lame horse, and can cook and sing, after a fashion. He can fix a broken cinch or build a fence or a cattle pond, though he's loathe to admit doing any sort of labor out of the saddle.

My character also enjoys hunting, so he can set a trap, recognize spoor, field dress a kill, then skin it and salt the hide. He grew up with a Pawnee wrangler on the ranch in Nebraska, so he speaks a little of that language and brags he breaks horses 'the Indian way,' without saddle or bridle.

And while he can build a corral with a gate, he can't build a house with straight lines or a roof that won't leak when it rains. He can cape an elk hide but not mount the head for his wall. He can keep the books for a cattle drive but he's not a banker. He's a skilled rider but not a circus acrobat. There are common-sense limits to what he knows, adjudicated by determining ". . . the extent of knowledge in question . . . and determin[ing] what could be done with this knowledge" (1e AD&D DMG, p. 12).

So how good is my character at cowboying or hunting? Let's take another look at 1e AD&D secondary skills:

However, some minor knowledge of certain mundane skills might belong to the player character - information and training from early years or incidentally picked up while the individual was in apprenticeship learning his or her primary professional skills of clericism, fighting, etc. . . . As a general rule, having a skill will give the character the ability to determine the general worth and soundness of an item, the ability to find food, make small repairs, or actually construct (crude) items, For example, an individual with armorer skill could tell the quality of normal armor, repair chain links, or perhaps fashion certain weapons (ibid)

The presumed competence of player characters' secondary skills in 1e AD&D is fairly low - the focus of the characters is on their class skills, with secondary skills meant mostly as flavor, not alternate career choices.

For our Boot Hill campaign, the presumed competence of the player characters is higher. If you describe cowboying or bartending or saddlemaking as your primary vocation, then you can do things a person experienced in that job can do competently - you don't need to roll against your saddlemaking skill to see ". . . whether the work was performed properly and to the customer’s satisfaction" (3e Boot Hill, p. 17).

In my experience, when you start worrying about stuff like who can make a better saddle, or worse, making a rule, assigning a value, and then rolling to determine who's more successful at making a saddle, then the experience of playing the game becomes one of seeing who has the longest numerical genitalia. In Flashing Blades - you knew I'd find a way to work in a FB reference, right? - characters who are Masters or Masters Superior of a skill no longer roll for routine skill usage - they are presumed competent enough that ". . . a character will automatically make most rolls to use that skill. Only in very difficult situations should he be required to roll against an attribute, and then, with a +3 bonus. Masters Superior need roll even less often; and, when they do, they receive a +6 bonus" (FB, p. 6). The game tells you that once your character achieves a level of presumed competence, that rolling isn't worthwhile anymore, except in the most challenging situations. For 2e Boot Hill, we've taken that as our baseline.

Since our characters' skills are constituted ad hoc, they're presumed competent, and there is no specific rule for adjudicating results, then how are points of failure, those 'difficult situations,' addressed in our campaign? Let's look at one of the scenarios in BH2 Lost Conquistador Mine, a wildfire that has the potential to trap the adventurers as they search for the mine. The scenario assigns a 50% chance of a horse to panic and bolt until they run themselves to exhaustion; if the adventurers attempt to gallop away from the fire, then there's a 40% choice of a horse breaking a leg or going lame and a thrown character suffering a wound. It's not, 'My character has +40 Horsemanship so I'm better at avoiding this hazard than the rest of the party' - it's, 'While your characters are skilled riders, you're each exposed to this hazard at this chance.'

This approach used to be very common in roleplaying games, before designers added more and more rules to differentiate the ability of characters from one another. At the time I started playing roleplaying games, your character was an archer because she primarily used a bow and looked for ways to maximize her advantage on the tabletop, not because she took the Archer class, an archery feat tree, and dipped into two different bow-related prestige classes. Despite nearly no rules-delineated differences between our characters outside of combat, we each have a good sense of what our characters can do well, in relation to one another and to the game-world generally. We're creative in interpreting what our characters know, and when questions arise, we resort once again to our highly expedient system of consensus around the table, sometimes making up an ad hoc roll, most of the time just waving it off, because our characters are good enough to walk and chew gum without rolling dice for success.

14 August 2016

I won't try to deny the narcissist impulse that drives gamers to talk about their characters with strangers, but I do have at least two ulterior motives: first, to give an example of what a 2e Boot Hill character looks like for those unfamiliar with the system, and second, to mention something about the approach taken to the campaign in which I'm playing right now.

Characters in 2e Boot Hill (just BH from here on out) have six starting attributes: Speed, Gun and Throwing Accuracy, Strength, Bravery, and Experience, all of which may improve over the course of the game. Each attribute is generated by a d% roll referenced with a table which provides the actual attribute score. Rolls for BH player characters are weighted to give the adventurers higher scores, marking them as 'special' individuals - again, the number rolled is cross-referenced with another 'Initial Modifications' table, and the modifier added to the roll, so if you roll 27 for your character's Speed (Above Average), you get a +15 bonus making it 42 (Quick), but if you roll 83 (Very Fast), the bonus is +5 making it 88 (which is still Very Fast). Note that 'Average' as a rating isn't, really: the table values aren't a bell curve, so 'Average' is simply descriptive - where these descriptions come into play is creating non-player characters, which is the subject for another post.

Speed determines who shoots first, and how many shots you get off before the next guy fires. The two accuracy scores affect the character's chance to hit - 'throwing' accuracy covers knives, spears and bows. Bravery has two modifiers, one for Speed and one for Accuracy. Strength is 'hit points.' Experience represents the actual number of 'gunfights' the character survives, which in turn affects Accuracy.

Here are my rolls -

Attribute

Mod'd Roll

Description

Ability Score

Speed

94

Lightning

+15

Gun Accuracy

69

Good

+7

Throwing Accuracy

93

Excellent

+15

Strength

63

Sturdy

15

Bravery

74

Brave

+2/+6

Experience

31

0

-10

Initial modifications pumped up the character's Gun Accuracy, Strength and Bravery, but Speed and Throwing Accuracy are as-rolled - a hot hand - as is Experience, which does not get an initial modification. So he's damn fast, accurate with 'thrown' weapons but less so with firearms, reasonably tough, passably brave, and never been in a gunfight. Characters with high throwing accuracy tend to get pigeon-holed a couple of ways, as knife-throwers in the mold of Britt from The Magnificent Seven or as Native Americans with a bow and a lance. Neither of those appeal to me, however: while knives are insanely deadly in hand-to-hand combat in BH, as thrown weapons they can be a dicey proposition in a fight, not something I'd build a character concept around, and while I've run Native American and mixed-blood - 'half-breed' - characters in the past, notably a cavalry scout, playing 'guy with a bow' isn't what I'm looking for out of Boot Hill or Wild West gaming in general.

So how about a lariat?

Lariats are one of the big omissions from the 2e core rules but they're trivially simple to houserule, and Throwing Accuracy is the obvious choice for resolving a lasso 'attack.' So right now I'm looking at a cowboy character, with the speed and skill to be a damn fine roper.

The next character 'atrribute' I need to roll is Age, which is 3d10+12 - a range of fifteen to forty-two - and I roll eight, so my character is twenty years old, which fits well with his lack of gunfighting Experience. For the next few years, until he reaches twenty-five years old, my character's Speed, Accuracy, and Strength rolls will increase slightly each year.

Everything else is whatever I choose it to be. This is an important point. Boot Hill doesn't deal in backgrounds or skills or Aspects or pretty much anything else - there is minimal 'system mastery' to exploit, few 'traps' to avoid. If I decide my character is a scout or a detective, he gets a small bonus to tracking rolls, if I decide he's a gambler, I can roll for a Gambler Rating and cheat, and if I decide he was an artillerist, he can fire a cannon or a Gatling gun without penalties. If I decide my character is a former Union Army artillerist turned Pinkerton who gambles, I get 'em all. There's no attempt to 'balance' these barebones benefits past the good judgement of the players and the referees - beyond the attribute rolls , the rules are largely silent.

When I played BH in the past, we'd usually cobble something together for players who wanted a particular ability for their character; a player who wants her character to be good with her fists might trade 20% off her Gun Accuracy in exchange for a +2 on Punching and Grappling roles. For the campaign I'm playing now, even small trade-offs like this aren't a consideration - make up whatever you like, because we're grown-ups who aren't trying to dick one another and no one feels the need to play nanny over who gets what.

I decide my character played cards in the bunkhouse with the other hands, and got to be pretty good at it, so he gets a Gambler Rating. Characters with a Gambler Rating get a bonus when gambling and they can cheat - the Gambler Rating determines if they pull it off without getting caught. A Gambler Rating ranges from one to fifty - roll d%, and if the rolls is between 1-50, that's the rating, and if it's 51 or higher, subtract 50 from the roll. I roll 68, which gives my character a Gambler Rating of 18 - in general terms, he has an 18% chance of getting caught if he tries to cheat, but the chance increases if other gamblers are at the table. My character can probably fleece a couple of greenhorns without getting caught, but cheating a table full of high rollers is a risky proposition.

My mind wanders a bit, the character of Button from Open Range pops into my head and won't go away, and Eladio Rogelio Luna de la Cruz is born. Rather than the stereotypical 'Mexican' vaquero, Eladio Luna was born in Texas but raised in Nebraska Territory, when his father was hired to drive a herd north to a ranch near Fort Kearny and stayed on with his family as foreman. Eladio grew up on the ranch, educated by the rancher's wife with her own children - he's from two worlds, one tejano, one Anglo. He speaks Spanish, English and "some Pawnee," and he can read and write and figure. He has an older brother and a younger sister. He was a wrangler as a boy and a cowpuncher as a young man, and now he's gone in search of his own place in the world. It's probably the most extensive background I've written for a character in a decade or more, and none of it is 'paid for' mechanically - there are no rules for languages, nor for literacy, so I just take what fits the character.

Because the NPC reaction tables from BH1 Mad Mesa and BH2 Lost Conquistador Mine figure prominently in the campaign, the choice to play a character who's 'Mexican' means that just being who he is is more likely to create trouble; per BH2 Mexicans get a -2 and Indians and half-breeds get a -4 and per BH1 strangers get a -1 on a 2d6 reaction roll, so the social interaction hill starts off steeper than it does for Anglo characters, to be sure.

Next comes equipment, which basically means guns. As I've written elsewhere, BH doesn't attempt to stat the differences between a Colt Peacemaker and a Smith & Wesson Schofield - both are six-shot single-action revolvers, or SAR6 in BH. If you want to skin your SAR6 as an 1851 Colt Navy with the Richards-Mason conversion for centerfire cartridges, go nuts. Characters start with $150.00 - sidearms run in the $20.00 for an antiquated percussion-cap-and-ball revolver to $40.00 for a fast-draw revolver with its own gunbelt. Before you think of loading up on ironmongery, horses and saddles can swallow a big chunk of that starting cash. As much as I would like to start the game with a sweet ride, I settle for a poor quality horse - skinned as a dun mare named Conchita - and a saddle and tack, which eats up $60.00 right out of the gate. Since the campaign is starting with the adventure Mad Mesa, I want my character to start with stakes for gambling, and that means going cheap for now. An SAR6 - a Remington 1858 New Army converted to rimfire - a box of shells, and a knife round out his starting gear.

The characters in the campaign each add a couple of personal items to their kit - I created my character weeks before I stumbled across Chris' brilliant "Random Crap" table for Boot Hill, or I might've rolled on that instead. For Eladio, it's a buffalo robe and a rosary made from blue glass trade beads. Once again, there are no table rules for this beyond 'pick a couple of things your character starts with.' My favorite is the character who owns a photo of himself with Generals Sheridan and Custer in a small silver frame.

Once I know what weapons Eladio carries, I can figure out how fast and accurate he is with them. A character's Base Speed is calculated by adding together her Speed modifier, her Bravery modifier, and her weapon speed. Eladio's SAR6 is a Fast weapon, so the modifier is +8, while the knife (KN) is Average with a +5 modifier. A character's To Hit score is the sum of his Accuracy, Bravery, and Experience modifiers plus fifty, which gives the character's percent chance to hit. Foe Eladio, it looks like this.

Weapon

Speed modifier

Bravery modifier

Weapon Speed modifier

= Base Speed

SAR6

+15

+2

+8

+25

KN

+15

+2

+5

+22

Weapon

Accuracy modifier

Bravery modifier

Experience modifier

+ 50 = Base Accuracy

SAR6

+7

+6

-10

53%

KN

+15

+6

-10

61%

One of my personal tests for a roleplaying game is, can I fit my character on an index card? Here's what Eladio Luna looks like if he's represented the same way as non-player characters in the BH adventures -

Eladio Luna
SAR6+25 BAC 53%
KN+22 BAC 61%
STR 15 GR 18 Age 20

That's the rules-skeleton of my character. If he tries to track someone or something, if he tries to blow something up with dynamite, if his presence affects non-player characters around him, if he gets into a fist fight, the core rules have him covered - everything else is left up to the best judgement of the players and the referee. I'll be talking much more about that in a later post.

10 August 2016

This is an offshoot, a side project, whatever you want to call it, from Really Bad Eggs. I've not given up on RBE at all - in fact, I'm deep into two pretty extensive projects for that blog, and with my coaching commitments at a low ebb for the next few months, I hope to be able to bring one or both of them to completion in the not-too-distant future.

But in the meantime I'm playing in a 2e Boot Hill campaign, and it's a lot of fun, and I'm inspired to write a bit about it.